Recycling: Can the World Live Without It?

The answer to that is yes. The world can very much live without having to recycle. However, the difference between the recycling and non-recycling worlds is the atmosphere of cleanliness and preservation of the earth’s resources. Without recycling, there would be innumerable material going into waste. Everything would seem to run out more rapidly. In the world today, there is so much recycling going on. Also, there are many people who could add on to the growing number of recycling: YOU!

With recycling come several benefits. Resources are saved, materials become reused, and the atmosphere becomes less endangered. Recycling is not just handing over plastic bottles, paper, aluminum and glass to a recycling center, but it’s saving our world from further pollution.

Nature is greatly affected through recycling. When regular waste and garbage are dumped into landfills, an aroma and scene of scum and helplessness is created. A landfill is an area that cages in all of our garbage. There are many many landfills all over our planet. The garbage becomes a hill, then a mountain of just trash and trash. When I mention nature is affected, I mean the animals, birds, and atmosphere.

In this case of not recycling, nature is hurt. A landfill is open to everything and anything. Birds that fly by and land in a landfill are tempted to look for goodies. Many birds get trapped into plastic bottle separators. In some countries where cows are like pedestrians, landfills are like playgrounds for them. Cows end up grazing around landfills, and end up eating plastic bags like its grass. From the website You Tube is a clip from a documentary film, Recycling, Waste and Its Impact on the Environment, that presented several details on how to make earth a healthier place to live. Also, glass builds up so much because it does not break down compared to paper.

Paper is so important to recycle. Think about how much you throw away in one day: or one week. Now multiple that number by thousands: although you may think, throwing away a couple sheets here and there won’t hurt, it has a huge impact on saving resources. There are many who think that throwing out paper won’t hurt. Imagine if everyone was to recycle every paper meant to be trashed: a great amount of trees would be saved, which adds on to oxygen levels in the atmosphere.

All the junk in the landfills emit methane into the air. There is compost, glass, paper, aluminum, and several other things in landfills. With all the waste and its’ juices, a gas is produced that harms our planet’s ozone layer. This is already dangerous as it is, with pollution and global warming making the ozone layer endangered. Not recycling, believe it or not, adds on to it. An increase in numbers of recycling means a safer ozone layer, and that means to enforce recycling in more areas.

Some states have recycling laws. Where some cities have only trash cans, other cities have recycling bins along with their trash cans. Having recycling bins encourages a person to do more recycling. As opposed to those who have the bins, those who don’t are less encouraged.

I spoke with my brother who lives in Michigan. He told me that while he grew up, he would always save pop cans and plastic bottles. My brother and my dad would go to the local grocery store and fill the machine up with pop cans and 2-liter bottles and get ten cents back for each can or bottle. It was a good way of keeping the environment clean because it helped the usage of plastics and aluminum from the soda companies to make for other uses. I also interviewed my sister-in-law, who happened to grow up in Canada. I wanted to ask her because being that she’s from another country, I was curious about how they took care of their recycling. She told me that there was a paper recycling company that picked up paper every Wednesday, and so they’d have all the papers in the house that would normally get thrown out into this blue container and left it on the front porch. In public places, she told me there are trash cans for garbage, but next to the trash can is another bin only for pop cans and plastic bottles. She said this was the way they recycled their aluminum and plastics, whereas in America, we would get ten cents back. Albeit she pointed out that when they buy soda from the store, they don’t get charged extra for the deposit of the can or plastic bottle, thus not having to worry about refunds of ten cents.

I hope the people of this great planet earth will realize one day that if this world suffers, only mankind is to be blamed. The way we live in our homes and take care of it, this planet is our home and it is up to us to take of it! If everyone puts in the effort to recycle, the negative effects of harming our world will sharply decrease.